ELLE's critic falls under the spell of the Hugh Hefner extravaganza

It's conceivable that none of this would have happened—he show itself, its ever-growing cult following (the audience for E!'s The Girls Next Door has nearly doubled between this year and last) had Kendra not decided to have her boobs done the second she turned 18 with the money she'd saved up by working as a dental assistant and at Papa John's pizza. (The other two girls, for those of you who haven't yet tuned in to the weirdly addictive pleasures of The Girls Next Door, are Holly and Bridget.) And, of course, had she not posed for a photo shoot wearing, as she describes it, a "Daisy Duke sheer top" and shorts, with her blond hair all scrunched. And if the photo hadn't happened to arrive, as if by magic, at the Playboy Mansion in L.A.—how the photo got there isn't certain, but what is known is that it ended up in a color printer, where it instantly caught the visual imagination of Mr. Playboy himself, just this side of 80 at the time but still a connoisseur sine qua non of comely females.

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"I wanted to do something with the money," Kendra explains on a drizzly January day when we talk in the mansion's baronial study, where two bronze greyhounds stand guard by the fireplace. "Hmm, I thought, I'll get boobs. If I didn't get them, I wouldn't be here. They were my best investment." She is wearing coral sweats, Ugg-like boots, and not a scrap of makeup. Although Holly and Bridget are both makeup-free when I meet them as well, I expected Kendra to come out with her face on and her guns blazing. In person she gives off a palpable air of anxiety, a hunted quality that makes her seem more like a wounded pigeon than the butt-shaking, trash-talking, glammed-up creature she acts (or impersonates) on the show. Throughout our conversation she circles around the subject of her appearance, first referring self-consciously to her "slight acne" and later saying, "I'm very insecure right now about my face. I get scared with Hef looking at me at the mansion and maybe thinking I'm ugly."

In spring 2004, the idea of a reality show based on Hugh Hefner's life—which, you might argue, was already a reality show, one which Hefner had been keeping scrapbooks on all along (Kevin Burns, the show's cerebral and unlikely producer, says that Hefner "documents his life more than the Library of Congress") —was still in the discussion stage. Several producers had approached Hefner, and he was mulling over the concept when he had opportunity to scrutinize Kendra at closer range as she passed Jell-O shots, dressed in nothing but body paint, at one of his retro-hip parties. These no-expenses-spared bashes went out of favor for a time during the late '80s and '90s —an era that coincided with Hefner's second marriage, to Playboy centerfold Kimberley Conrad (Burns describes her as "exotically and intimidatingly beautiful"), and its gradual unraveling. But tickets to mansion events have become a hot item once again, drawing older celebrities like Jack Nicholson and George Clooney as well as a younger crowd that includes Luke and Owen Wilson and Leonardo DiCaprio. (Any doubts I harbored about their renewed popularity were put to rest when I discovered that my own pass to a movie and buffet night at the mansion was delivered to the Four Seasons in a sealed envelope and then locked in the hotel's safe until I picked it up. These passes were so coveted, I was told, that I could sell mine on eBay for $500.)

On that fateful evening, an 18-year-old Kendra had been hired, like the other young lovelies who milled around the mansion's well-tended grounds, for her decorative appeal, which more than met with Hefner's approval. (The house is located in tony Holmby Hills, and there is enough space —six acres of it —for an enormous, slippery slide that the girls, especially Holly, like to swish down, thereby providing picturesque material for the show.) There was something about Kendra's oval face, delicate features, and striking blue-gray eyes that had fascinated Hefner even before he met her —stirring up long-ago yearnings, or "lovemaps," as he calls them. She reminded him, he confided as we sat across from each other at a backgammon table that doubles as a coffee table, of a movie star whose silvery, platinum-blond image he'd been carrying around since boyhood. Hefner credits the movies, which he fell in love with as a shy 13-year-old in saddle shoes from "a typical repressed Puritan home" in the Midwest, with opening up "the magic of possibilities" for him. He remains an aficionado, hosting movie nights four times a week in the mansion's large screening room; on Fridays Hefner reads from six to eight pages of painstakingly researched notes on the backstory of the evening's film.

And so the life-altering phone call came, seemingly out of the blue and —even more surprisingly —made by Hef himself. (Everyone calls Hefner "Hef," although the familiarity strikes me as purely gestural, the way PAs on movie sets call directors who inspire fear and trembling —Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen —by their first names.) Despite all those years of orgies with gorgeous and fawning centerfolds, Hefner remains a shy boy unwilling to risk rejection. In the past he'd usually approached potential bedmates via intermediaries, but this time he personally rang Kendra up and asked whether she would like to move into his legendary pad and join Holly and Bridget. (For a brief period after his split in 1998 from Kimberley, with whom he sired two sons, Hefner got busy repolishing his somewhat tarnished image—there's nothing like getting hitched to ruin your reputation as an Ur—sexual adventurer—by dating and clubbing with renewed septuagenarian zeal and playing host to seven live-in girlfriends with names like Buffy and Tiffany. But that was before he was persuaded by Holly and Bridget, who were fast friends, to "downsize,"as he puts it.) Kendra would bring, Hefner reasoned, a bit of hip-hop to the premises; she stood for the newly hatched generation with her love of sports and her diamond mouthpiece (aka "grill"), her fleeting attention span and her best friend named Brittany. ("Books?" Hefner says, describing Kendra's distinctly unintellectual charm. "What's a book?")

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Whether Kendra's arrival was the spark that jump-started The Girls Next Door or whether it had nothing to do with Hefner's decision to give this unscripted and plotless TV phenomenon a shot despite his misgivings (he characterizes reality shows as "dumb and a waste of time") is hard to parse out. Especially when the man in question is a brand unto himself and the Tudor manor house he has lived in since the early '70s—when his then-girlfriend Barbi Benton persuaded him to give up the great Chicago indoors for the California sun—must have struck visitors as more of a stage set than a private residence well before it began to play a starring role in the show. This large and somewhat creaky establishment depends upon a staff of 80. The 24/7 kitchen crew is kept busy ensuring that Hefner's meals, all served on a tray in his bed, are made according to his very specific and ritualistic requirementsmdash;he has his own drawer of cookies in the kitchen labeled H.M.H. (the M stands for Marston) —and tending to the sudden cravings of his girlfriends as well as the culinary preferences of their seven dogs and one cat.

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Which brings us to my own secret and somewhat worrying fascination with a retrograde show about the mindless adventures of three Barbies. All the girls are blond, lissome, what used to be called "stacked," and positively antediluvian in their embrace of unliberated femininity. All three seemingly live to organize birthday parties and schedule grooming appointments for their various pets; paint Easter eggs and decorate oversize heart-shape cookies; and shop for the scanty and somewhat tinselly clothes they dress up in the better to please the ancient Sugar Daddy who funds their fun. Bridget, who is the crone of the trio at age 33 and the only one who appears to have come by her breasts naturally (she may also be, I heard, separated from a husband who has been elided from her life story), is particularly enamored of theme events. She could give any professional party planner a run for her money, whiz that she is at wrapping the cunning, carefully chosen presents that the show's endless procession of festivities require—like the French-speaking doll she found for Holly's twenty-seventh birthday celebration, when Holly dressed up as Marie Antoinette, the butlers wore powdered wigs, and everyone was urged to eat cake.

Sure, I could blame my introduction to The Girls Next Door on my 17-year-old daughter, who happened to be watching it one night when I happened to take a look, but truth be told, she began to lose interest in the show even as mine heated up, and had to be coaxed into watching with me. I needed her as a cover (if only for myself to myself) so I wouldn't feel so glaringly immature and anachronistic and, well, plain imbecilic. How could I explain it to my friends, who took me to be a creature of substance, one whose sensibilities had been partially shaped by feminist assertions about the patriarchy's commodification of women? (Although I'd never warmed to the strident and humorless aspect of feminism, I sent my own daughter to an all-girls school precisely in the belief that it would do her good to not have to act cute rather than smart to please the boys.) Did its allure for me suggest that the attempt to empower women had failed?

There were other questions raised by the show's unanticipated popularity with women. (Its core audience has turned out to be 18-to-34-year-old females rather than the gawking, pimply boys and paunchy older men the mavens over at E! thought it would attract.) Did it mean that young women were no longer as impressed with finding themselves through their work—or finding themselves, period—before starting to look for a man? Or could it be intimating that self-definition wasn't all it was cracked up to be, seeing as how at the end of the day it left you tired from having to hold down the fort now that men were no longer masterful providers but nitpicking partners—if, that is, they hadn't been scared off the chase altogether. Then again, was it possible that the steady ascension of The Girls Next Door, now in its third season, hinted at nothing larger than its campy value as entertainment?

It was in aid of understanding my own puzzling interest and the equally puzzling interest of women such as my 31-year-old friend Alana Newhouse, who is an editor at a venerable century-old Jewish weekly by day and an obsessed Girls watcher by night, and of Liza Monroy, a 27-year-old writer who is publishing her first novel and takes pains to distinguish her own interest in the show from that of the masses, that I flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Hef and the girls. Honesty bids me admit that Holly, with her doelike eyes and mixture of dreaminess and steel, is the reason I was drawn into the show in the first place. (Her name is also the one-word answer Alana gives when I ask her why she is so riveted.) If you are of a mind, as I am, to deconstruct the show's underlying metaphysics, it is possible to see Holly as both a romantically fixated heroine out of a Barbara Cartland novel (or, for that matter, out of Madame Bovary) and a shrewd, very contemporary cookie. There is an intensity to her as well as an inquiring mind—she's always working on her French or boning up on historical facts—that is easier for me to identify with than Bridget's boppy cheerleader approach or Kendra's dazed personality and limited vocabulary (in which cool, great, and no way figure largely, when she's not being bleeped for swearing).

Holly, in other words, is who I imagine I might have been if I'd chanced to be born into entirely different circumstances: She grew up in Alaska and Oregon, the oldest of three siblings (her younger sister is a second-grade teacher), and always wanted to live in Southern California. She attended Portland State and then Loyola Marymount, where she studied theater and psychology. While still in school, she became a Hawaiian Tropic girl, at which point Hef entered the picture (a friend of his spotted her at a Hawaiian Tropic girl contest), and Holly started getting invited to mansion pool parties. Somewhere along the way she developed a huge crush on Hef that is both movingly sentimental (her nickname for him is Puffin) and scarily determined. Hefner alludes in passing to the fact that Holly, who wasn't his instant type the way Kendra was, set her sights on him rather than the reverse: "She found me and she loved me."He goes on to explain that she doesn't look the same as when he first met her, that she "became beautiful," helped by "a little thing she had done to her nose."

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Holly, who, like the other two, wears sweats for our interview, announces to me that she'd like to stay at the mansion "forever" and lets on her wish to marry Hef and have his children at least once per episode. It is luminously clear to anyone watching the show that she (1) only barely tolerates Kendra and (2) is biding her time until the day when she can claim her rightful place as the one and only live-in. Hefner, in turn, is visibly enamored of her—he calls her "an old soul"—and a Page Six item ran in late February stating that he'd decided to fulfill Holly's dream of becoming the next (and last) Mrs. Hef. Although the timing of this juicy tidbit suggested that it was no more than a publicity stunt, it doesn't seem entirely off the map. Still, when I press Hefner about whether he plans to have children with Holly, he turns chivalrously vague. "It's not a probability," he says in his mellow, gravelly voice, "but it's a possibility."

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"The only reason for three girlfriends," Holly asserts, looking somewhat drawn and less animated than she does on TV, "is the show. Or maybe," she adds, lapsing into a tentative tone, "I need to believe that." Toward the end of our conversation, in which she has described herself as "devoted to love, romance, and a lasting relationship" and discussed the books she's reading (Through a Window, by Jane Goodall, and a biography of Madame Pompadour), Holly strikes her usual sprightly note, sounding for all the world like a contented housewife putting the mansion to rights: "I get embarrassed if people come over and it isn't nice," she explains. "I found really good fabric for cushions in the 'Van Room.'"(I can only presume the room is appointed with a mirrored ceiling and padded walls to simulate sex in the backseat.)

To get to the front door of the mansion, you have to come up a curved driveway past yellow traffic signs that say BRAKE FOR ANIMALS and PLAYMATES AT PLAY. Hefner is compulsively punctual (every so often on the show you can detect real irritation in his voice at Kendra's habitual late comings); my interviews had been orchestrated down to the second by Playboy's PR office, as though I were visiting the White House. So Hefner caught me off guard with his modest outlook on his achievements, which are, by the by, not to be sneered at: Playboy is the best-selling men's magazine ever, fueled by its founder's practiced eye for a certain kind of clean-featured and unthreatening come-hither female pulchritude. Both his celebrity and his version of the Good Life (a mixture of boyish manliness and cheerful materialism that has been entertainingly summed up in Hef's Little Black Book) have endured for more than half a century, unlike many other now-you-see-it, now-you-don't American phenomena. (Hefner and his bunny imprimatur are recognized all over the world, as was apparent when the show went on a warp-speed two-week tour of Europe.) He is surprisingly unsmarmy and seemingly without a coarse bone in his body; despite his aversion to leaving the insular universe of the mansion, he has a youthful curiosity about the world outside it. What I was most struck by, however, were his psychological take on things and his capacity for self-reflection, both unexpected coming from a man who, as Burns characterizes him, is "the world's happiest 15-year-old boy."

A butler, William, hovered at the ready and a publicist planted herself a few discreet feet away as Hefner and I got down to talking, he puffing at his trademark pipe, dressed in his trademark silk pajamas and dressing gown, and me finding myself curiously at ease. To hear him tell it, his marriage to Kimberley was no more than a failure of nerve. He says he lost his footing after his 1985 stroke, suddenly finding he was no longer desirable to the opposite sex: "When you get to a certain age, they look right through you; they don't see you. I did what was unthinkable for me. I was seeking a safe harbor after riding the waves. When I got married, I felt I had gotten old."

I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that the delicious irony —call it poetic justice—of the situation is not lost on Hefner, notwithstanding my sense that what causes him the most chagrin in retrospect is that he remained faithful during his eight and a half years with Kimberley—only to be rewarded for his efforts by being ignominiously dumped. All the same, the man who is the embodiment of the priapic principle, who can be held accountable for making unfettered male lust seem as all-American as baseball and apple pie, admitting to feeling out of the game at 60: What better sense of payback can any post-babe feel? How do you like the shoe on the other foot, Mr. Playboy?

This seems as good a moment as any to pose what I consider the $64,000 question: Given that his vision of life doesn't allow for women over 30 as love objects, what does he think they should do? Collectively jump out of the window when their time is nigh? Hefner, who told me that he identifies with women more than men, deftly circumvents the question with one of his hearty laughs. By all rights, I should be annoyed if not infuriated at his implicit dismissal of all us Grown Up Girls Next Door. But instead, I find myself feeling wistful; Hefner is captivating enough that I've begun to envision myself in the role of an age-appropriate partner, busy at my writing until the end of the day when Hef and I meet for dinner and a movie. Or maybe I could share him with Holly.

In the wake of his separation from Kimberley, Hefner describes himself as having been "emotionally beat-up and bruised." (One of his more attractive aspects is that he lacks the macho posture, the strutting quality I associate with womanizing types.) For all of his being a fabled lothario and enthusiast of multiple bed partners —"Sexual adventure," he says quietly, "has meant a great deal to me"—Hefner considers himself a romantic in the guise of a hedonist. He maintains that he's always sought out primary relationships and is "not good" at ending them. (What he seems to be, in fact, is some kind of one-woman man, but don't tell any of the guys that.) When I ask why Kimberley wanted out of the marriage, his response sounds more like a shrink than a rake. "She's incapable of romantic attachment," he says, giving the lie to his fuck-'em-and-leave-'em image.

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Of course, it is precisely in his antimonogamous Keeper of the Harem role—despite his stroke, his age, and his slight hearing trouble—that Hef appears on Girls. What, then, is one to make of the Solomonic style of romantic attachment that marks the show? What to make of the show's flimsy (not to mention implausible) premise, which is that the torch for the red-blooded male and his carnal fantasies is being carried on single-handedly by a courtly and somewhat distant man who is going into his ninth decade and seems less lascivious than absentmindedly affectionate, like the father on ancient TV shows (beloved of me) like Gidget or The Patty Duke Show.

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Burns, who tends to vote Republican and references Camille Paglia, has thought long and hard about why the show has become a sleeper hit. He believes people watch for one of three reasons, which he enumerates over dinner for my benefit: (1) to laugh at and feel superior to it; (2) because it's genuinely funny and sweet; or (3) because they find the show strangely empowering, in that it's the women who are ultimately in charge. Most importantly, he believes the show works as well as it does because the girls are three in number rather than two, say, or four. Each one, he explains, has a different reason for being there and together make up a "perfect trio," representing a balance between the emotional (Bridget), physical (Kendra), and intellectual (Holly). Similarly, Burns points out, the three different sides of Hefner are represented in the girls: The casual part of him loves Kendra; the emotional loves Bridget; and the genius who founded an empire based on a vision of adult life as a series of recreational activities featuring pneumatic playmates loves Holly.

It sounds intriguing in theory, but the reality of the show is that although the threesome share equal billing—all are officially Hef's girlfriends and are discouraged from going out on the town without him (they're sometimes held to a 9:00 curfew, like students in a strict boarding school)—they don't feature equally in Hef's life. While Holly bunks with him and his commodious bed (it doesn't rotate like the mythic Round Bed at the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago, but it still accommodates 12 nicely), Bridget and Kendra have their own bedrooms. Bridget's is bedecked with Hello Kitty paraphernalia. Kendra's is girlishly messy, with clothes and underwear strewn everywhere; in the third season, an aging ex-Playmate named Julie shows Kendra how to store things in boxes and pick up after herself, like a kindly dorm mother. (Former Playmates regularly put in appearances, seeming none the worse for Restylane and face-lifts; in one of my favorite episodes, Barbi Benton visibly loses her cool when she meets Holly, her eyes flashing with fury at having been replaced in Hef's affections.) Hefner's real involvement, other than as a generous figure who looks on fondly while his bodacious charges gambol through days spun out of raindrops on roses and bright-colored packages tied up with string, is left purposely blurry. It's not clear, for instance, if he does more than smooch with Bridget and Kendra, occasionally rounding out the scenario by offering a hug and affectionate pat on the derriere. Holly is another story, but how much of another story isn't clear, either.

Then again, the wobbly logistics of Girls don't hold up under too close a scrutiny, and probably aren't meant to. The show is an updated version of an erotically muted and old-fashioned fantasy—or, to put it another way, it's about mutually accommodating (or mutually exploitative) fantasies of what men and women can expect from each other circa an idealized '50s prototype. What is on offer—and what I think Hefner has always peddled —is a version of sexism that is benevolent rather than hostile. In this trade-off, women are seen as fragile and inadequate; they are both idealized and restricted in exchange for being protected and provided for. Instead of competing directly with men for social access and financial power, they get their share of glory by acting cooingly dependent and cultivating their appearance. The female in question has only to be pretty enough (aided, if need be, by surgery—Holly revealed to Us Weekly that she went from an A to a D-cup—and the zealous application of makeup) and the man will hand her his charge card and look after her forever. He gets his goods in the form of arm candy, and she gets her goods in the form of...well, I guess you could call it unmetaphorical candy, the kind that comes wrapped in a white fur coat or diamond studs or private planes winging their way to fancy hotels. (Painful as it is to admit, the show has me so hooked that the little ditty with wink-wink lyrics that opens each episode—"Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gon-na give you ca-an-dy..."—runs through my head all day.)

Which may be why The Girls Next Door is so much escapist fun, speaking as it does to our Cinderella fantasies, the unreconstructed little-girl dreams we're supposed to reject as we grow up and become aware of the compromises traditional roles demand but which continue to seduce us even as we renounce them. Which may also be why the show, for all its dwelling on bobbing, silicone-enhanced breasts and its easy camaraderie with nudity, isn't essentially sexy so much as a half-cozy, half-tongue-in-cheek mixture of Father Knows Best and Girls Gone Wild. (One boundary-violating episode has Bridget practicing a bursting-out-of-a-cake striptease for Hef's eightieth birthday in front of her parents—in front of her father—as though she were practicing piano.) The wildness in this case has more to do with picking up cupcakes from the bakery (for Holly and Hef's anniversary) than picking up stray boys looking to get laid. Hef's mythic sex palace, it turns out, is nothing but a soft-porn slumber party. If you hang around long enough, you can catch Kendra bumping and grinding to some sexy song playing in her head, but that's about as much action as you'll get.

In the end, I guess you could rationalize the grip the show has on its audience by noting that it's good fun and that we all need time off from Hillary Clinton models of femaleness. You could—except for Kendra, whose "wild party girl" persona is integral to the show's appeal but also points to its troubling underside: its inability to separate the Playboy brand from the flesh-and-blood girls who help promote it. Despite her rogue airs, Kendra strikes me as clueless, a lost soul straight out of Nathanael West's devastating novella of Hollywood ambition, The Day of the Locust. (It seems only fitting that the mansion is a tourist stop on the official Hollywood Star Map.)

Holly, I sense, will manage with or without her darling Puffin. Even if her heart is broken (and I'm betting that she'll be at Hef's side until he gives up the ghost), she is aware of the possibility of an "expiration date" and assures me that being on the show has pushed her to do more than "sit around and eat bonbons."The ever-buoyant Bridget, whose father's copies of Playboy inspired her to want to be "really pretty," has kept her eye on the ball as well, planning for a future by taking voice-over classes and extension courses in broadcast journalism at UCLA.

So it is Kendra I worry about. For all her claims that Hef is her "her" and the person who "saved" her—q"I have a reason to live now,"she says—she seems terrified that she'll fail to earn her keep and end up back in the grungy circumstances where she started. Kendra seems to have had little in the way of an upbringing or education, and she tells me that she still feels "intimidated" when she talks to Hefner. And although she insists that she loves to laugh, her rat-tat-tat bray never suggests that she finds anything remotely funny.

Where will Kendra go when she is no longer the Pimp My Ride version of Alice in Wonderland? To the extent that Hefner has really saved her—Kendra's father left when she was four, and she appears to have developed no skin under her sass—she has the most to lose when she is once more outside the mansion's gates. "I go with my gut," she says confidently (and she used her earnings from the show to buy an apartment in San Diego), but in the next breath she says that she feels like she's on quot;a roller coaster." She knows she wants kids and a husband "after I get cut from here," but beyond that, it all seems hazy.

A month or so after I've returned home, it occurs to me that what Holly doesn't like about Kendra may be the same thing that left me feeling so uneasy after my visit—which is the dark mirror she holds up to the pampered bird-in-a-cage existence the girls lead. When I asked Holly at the close of our chat whether she'd ever want a daughter to follow in her footsteps, her answer was an emphatic "No!" She went on to say that she has "big plans" for her hypothetical daughters, just as she always had "big dreams" for herself. Who, I wonder, has plans or dreams—even little ones—for Kendra? And without them, will she become just another casualty of the starmaking machine, like former centerfolds Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith? Or is this where Hef's fatherly beneficence will come in, enabling her to seek refuge in the Playmate House if life gets too bumpy? Stay tuned.